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Follow-up to our Dev Brunch August 2010

Last Sunday , we held our Dev Brunch for August 2010. We had to meet early in August, as there will be a lot of holiday absence in the next weeks. The setting was more classical again, with a real brunch on a late sunday morning. We had a lot more registrations than finally attendees, but it was said this was caused by a proper birthday party the night before. Due to rainy weather, we stayed inside and discussed the topics listed below.

Clean Code Developer Initiative – The Clean Code Developer movement uses colored wristbands to subsequentially focus on different aspects of principles and practices of a professional software developer. Despite the name, it’s a german group with german web sites. But everybody who read Uncle Bob’s “Clean Code” knows what the curriculum is about. The talk gave a general summary about the intiative and some firsthand experiences with following the rules. If you read the book or are interested in profound software development, give it a try.

Non-bare repositories in git – The distributed version control system git differentiates between “bare” and “non-bare” repositories. If you are a local developer, you’ll use the non-bare type. When two developers with similar non-bare repositories (e.g. of the same project) meet, they can’t easily share commits or patches with the “push” command. This is a consequence of the “push” not being the exact opposite of the “fetch” command. If you try to synchronize two non-bare git repositories with push commands, you’ll most likely fail. The only safe approach is to introduce an intermediate bare repository or a branch in on of the repositories that only gets used by extern users. Even the repository owner has to push to this branch then. We discussed the setup and consequences, which are small in a broader use case and sad for ad-hoc workgroups.

Retrospection of the brunch

The group of attendees was small and a bit hung over. This led to a brunch that lacked technical topics a bit but emphasized social and cultural topics that didn’t make it on the list above. A great brunch just before the holiday season.